Elements of Style
by Nirav
Summary: Russell was always a period, a full stop, hard and uncompromising. Judy is like an ellipsis, soft and uncertain and never complete. Quinn would rather be a comma than either of her parents.


When Quinn registers for classes during orientation, she finds out that she technically isn't a freshman. All of the AP credit she earned apparently tipped her just into sophomore territory, and she finds herself registered for a semester of mid-level classes, her time split between multivariant calculus and classical rhetoric in modern media, biochemistry and an introduction to performance concepts, intensive introductory physics and sex and gender in society because she has no idea what she wants to study. Words are beautiful and literature was her first great love, but numbers are rational and nonjudgmental, real and unwavering and just cold enough to make her feel more human by comparison.

Besides, numbers leave no room for self-insertion but the laws of grammar have always mocked her for her loneliness, her uncertainty, her isolation even from the peak of high school popularity. She's stumbled through the past years like a sentence without punctuation, nonsensical and uncertain, lacking a point because she lacked a structure, but on the first day of classes, she sets her shoulders back and her chin high.

This is Yale, and the Quinn Fabray that Yale will know won't be a useless jumble of words that can't be sorted into sense.

* * *

Her calculus class is taught by the most senior professor in the department. Dr. Huron wears vests like Mr. Scheuster, but he's going bald in an unfortunate, patchy manner. He has a TA to handle the details and says nothing on the first day outside of an abrupt explanation that the adjunct who was meant to teach the section had a family emergency that forced her to return to India and he was the only professor available.

Quinn snidely questions his explanation to an exam problem after the midterms are returned, and he hits back with a well-placed barb about blonde hair and shallow expectations. She marches out of the class and doesn't return for a week. When she does, she takes notes diligently and turns in perfectly completed assignments for the rest of the semester and earns her A while glaring darkly at him the entire time. The course evaluation she turns in is scathing on a level even Sue Sylvester couldn't fathom, and it isn't until grades are posted that she feels a twinge of guilt.

* * *

The first semester is easy, but Christmas is hard. She has a plane ticket home until her mother calls to let her know that Russell will be joining them for Christmas dinner, and Quinn abruptly cashes it in and buys a train ticket to New York. Santana has three auditions lined up the week of Christmas and Quinn has a standing invitation and a spare key to her apartment, so when Quinn walks in, unannounced and brushing snow off of her coat, Santana just rolls her eyes and demands Quinn's contribution to their alcohol fund.

Santana's thrift store couch is lumpy and she smokes more now than ever before—out on the fire escape when Quinn is there, because Quinn's left lung will never be fully _right_ again and she's already had one minor lung infection this winter—but they stay up late drinking cheap wine and watching old cartoons on Netflix and drunkenly find a functioning pay phone down the block to prank call Rachel on at three AM.

Santana kisses her as the time clicks over into a new year, tasting like box chardonnay and Wheat Thins, and Quinn kisses her back just enough to make it something about _them_ instead of something about _her._

Russell was always a period, a full stop, hard and uncompromising. Judy is like an ellipsis, soft and uncertain and never complete. Quinn would rather be a comma than either of her parents.

* * *

She gets an email from Tina a week before Valentine's Day, citing an early acceptance to Yale and a hope to stay with Quinn for a weekend to get a feel of the school. Two weeks later, she meets Tina at the train station. It's ridiculous to believe that she might have actually shrunk since leaving Lima, but Tina looks taller and more intimidating than ever, so Quinn smiles timidly and her thoughts trail off into an ellipsis every time she opens her mouth. She considers the possibility that she'll never be anything but the worst of both of her parents, and it makes Tina look even bigger and more beautiful.

Tina smiles at her anyways and is kind and cheerful the whole weekend, even when Santana shows up unannounced with a smirk and half a handle of bottom-shelf tequila. Quinn lets Santana feed her shots until she's too drunk to feel tiny anymore and slides into trash talking Lima with her friends—her _friends_, Lucy thinks giddily at one point— until she passes out. It's fun and light and easy, but she still breathes a sigh of relief when Tina boards her train on Sunday.

* * *

Santana shows up, uninvited as always, on a Wednesday night in April. She's sloppy and unkempt in jeans and a sweatshirt, and Quinn does nothing but raise an eyebrow and let her into the building, commenting blithely that she still has some alcohol left from Santana's last visit.

By midnight, Santana is kissing her again, because Brittany's decided that a long-distance semi-open relationship is too much for either of them, because Brittany got an offer to join a dance troupe in Florida after graduating, because Santana left Lima to be great but suddenly isn't even good enough for Brittany. Because, Santana mutters brokenly, Brittany had cried and said that Santana deserved someone like Quinn, someone as smart as she was beautiful.

Santana is drunk and Quinn isn't—Thursday mornings yield an eight AM biochemistry II lab, after all—but she kisses Santana anyways and decides that maybe she's a dash, divisive and disruptive and forever harsh.

* * *

Quinn spends the summer in New York, interning at a publishing company. She fills her days with fetching coffee and making copies and wishing she'd taken the summer biochemistry course offered in New Haven instead, and her nights in Santana's bed. It all feels parenthetical, a disparate section of her life fully set apart from everything else, and when Santana calls her hesitantly not a week after Quinn's returned to New Haven to say she met a girl who wants to take her out, the parentheses close quietly.

* * *

Quinn is living off campus, but Tina is in the same dorm Quinn lived in last year. They have a weekly lunch date, on Wednesdays between Quinn's class on matrix theory and the advanced nonfiction workshop she'd somehow finagled herself into, because Tina is overwhelmed and Quinn is afraid of being a period, so she agrees.

Santana spends more time in New Haven than ever, because her auditions aren't going anywhere and she's still one of the smartest people Quinn's ever met. Quinn catches her reading through some of Quinn's leftover advanced mathematics textbooks more than once, and starts counting the days until Santana decides she wants to go to school after all.

Tina slides into the Yale social life more easily than Quinn ever did, the stutter of her past so far gone that she decimates her classmates' performances in her drama classes and wins a speaking part in the spring production. They still meet weekly for lunch, but Tina's kindheartedness has three times the friends that Quinn's prickly demeanor and intimidating beauty do, and somehow the weeks unfold into Tina convincing Quinn to come along to parties with all of her friends when Quinn would rather stay in and read.

It's been almost two years since she left Lima and so little remains of the arrogant cheerleading captain that she was that she likes to pretend it's all a footnote by now, an extemporaneous reference of little practical use, even if she still limps in the cold and gets lung infections too easily, even if she still celebrates a birthday that isn't her own every spring, even if she still spends almost all of her downtime with Tina Cohen-Chang or Santana Lopez, even if sometimes she still turns her head when someone calls the name Lucy.

She ignores the possibility that her life is a Danielewski novel, that the footnotes take up more energy than the story itself, that the fact that she's only just learning to run again after two years of physical therapy and another back surgery over Christmas break are anything but a footnote to be ignored.

* * *

In March, she's walking to class with Tina after their weekly lunch—Thursdays, this semester—and slips on a lingering patch of black ice. There's the briefest flash of Tina's concern hovering above her before the pain in her back leaps to the forefront and washes over her, and Quinn fades out like an ellipsis, silent and uncertain and weak like her mother.

She wakes in the hospital to her mother asleep in a chair at her bedside and Santana playing Angry Birds on Quinn's iPad and a brace on her back. Her legs hurt, the pain sharp and brilliant and beautiful , and Santana slaps the back of her head before checking to make sure Judy is still asleep and kissing Quinn, brief and angry and relieved.

Maybe—maybe—being an ellipsis isn't as terrible as she thought it might be.

* * *

She's taking another class with Dr. Huron. He turns out to have a dry sense of humor when he's teaching more advanced students, and he teases her good naturedly when she stops by his office after returning from the hospital to get her coursework. His eyes are curious when she doesn't crack a smile when he cracks a joke about how all the boys in class missed her while she was gone, and she's halfway back to her dorm when she realizes that her father always scoffed at dry humor, too.

She calls Tina spontaneously and they got out to a theater showing two-dollar classic films. The entire theater is empty, save for them, and they spend the entire time grumbling about gender stereotyping in films and begrudgingly admitting that Rachel Berry would have played the lead role so much better. Tina produces a joint out of her purse sometime in the middle of the movie, and Quinn almost runs from the theater; it takes Tina's quiet offer and promise of no pressure for Quinn to take an experimental inhale. The marijuana is sticky and sweet as it burns into her lungs, and she coughs outrageously before snatching it back from Tina to try again.

It's past midnight when Quinn makes her way into her bed, buzzed and content enough to feel like an ampersand, a conjunction, a unification of _Lucy_ and _Quinn_ and _Mommy_. It isn't enough, but it's better than a period, so maybe it's enough for the night.

* * *

Instead of an internship in New York—because the one the year before was terrible, because Santana was dating a bubbly dancer from one of Rachel's classes, because Quinn is still a period and nothing like a comma—Quinn spends her second summer working in a research assistantship with one of Yale's reclusive academic mathematicians who had taken a liking to her work. Her time is split between work and more physical therapy, because recovering from her fall in March has set her back into hydrotherapy, and she meets Jeremy, an engineering student on a track scholarship recovering from a partially torn hamstring with skin darker than Mercedes' and a smile like Sam's.

He takes her to movies and dinners and coffee dates, and is a gentleman like Sam was and sweet like Finn used to be and mischievous like Puck, and Santana hates him. Quinn's attachment to him is rational and quantifiable, and guilt seeps through her like ice and the lingering nightmares of waking up paralyzed every time he smiles adoringly at her or shows up at her closet-sized office with her favorite tea.

Santana was a parenthesis but Jeremy is a square bracket, an afterthought insertion with no intention beyond clarification. He's meant to clarify that Santana was nothing but a parenthetical addition, a moment in time that could exist or disappear without shifting the meaning of the sentence she was a part of, but all he ends up clarifying is that Santana is something else and Quinn is too good at using people up to be an ellipsis.

She stops returning Jeremy's calls a week after Santana breaks up with her bubbly dancer, and Quinn thinks back to her parents, an ellipsis and a period. The subtlety of a comma, bridging together two pieces that can't stand on their own, is perhaps more than she'll ever be. Tina comes back from her summer with Mike and they're sharing an apartment off campus, because Tina is still the only person Quinn's never hurt and the only person who can laugh off Quinn's bitchiness like Sam can laugh off Santana's insults, and Quinn considers the possibility of the semicolon.

* * *

The semester starts with emails from the registrar, the English department, and the math department because Quinn technically still hasn't declared a major and is just kind of plodding towards two instead because she keeps overloading her schedule every semester. Half of her courses for the semester are in the English department, but she's taking a senior seminar with Dr. Huron on special admission; she polls Tina and Santana and Rachel and Sam and seventeen of her peers before she finally just declares a double major.

Santana tells her she's an overachieving bitch and Tina says she's inspiring. Quinn ignores them both and makes a note in her overly detailed calendar—it's fuller than even Rachel's these days, as they discovered one day over Skype; Rachel sulked outrageously until Santana walked into her apartment unannounced and commandeered the laptop to talk to Quinn—to find time to speak with Dr. Huron and her new English advisor each about doctoral options.

* * *

Quinn, Tina, and Santana get drunk on a Thursday night in November, and Quinn wakes up the next morning half an hour before she's scheduled to meet with Dr. Huron—because it's only her third year but the department approved her admission, because she's the biggest overachiever she knows, because she's the unattainable goddess of every single person in the math department and she loves it enough to stretch herself to a breaking point just to stay the best—and her blonde hair is full of streaks of blue dye and a glaringly obvious hickey on her neck and her mind swims in the foggy memories of Tina convincing her that she could rock the hair dye and Santana convincing her later that Tina was so passed out she'd never remember if they hooked up in the kitchen.

Tina and Santana are still unconscious, flopped across the couch together, and the apartment smells vaguely like peroxide. Quinn kicks Tina's leg—because Tina's the only person who could convince Quinn to dye her hair _blue_—and flicks Santana's ear—because Santana's the only person who's ever had the courage to leave a hickey on her—and bolts out of the apartment with an armful of books and her glasses halfway to toppling off her face.

Her presentation goes off without a hitch once the he's squinted momentarily at her hair and ends with him telling her that it's good to see her relaxing a bit and she's never seemed this comfortable presenting before.

On her way home, she stops at the closest coffee shop and picks up a disgusting green tea drink that Tina loves so much. They're both groggy and hungover on the couch when she slams the door behind her; Tina winces and Santana swears softly and they both glare, but Quinn leans over the back of the couch and holds the tea ceremoniously in front of Tina with one hand while the other wraps around Santana's jaw to pull her around for a kiss that bordered on indecent.

Tina mumbles something that sounds like _finally_ before shoving Quinn's shoulder halfheartedly and curling into a ball around her disgusting green tea, and Santana manages to turn enough to grab Quinn around the waist and manhandle her over the back of the couch. No one has had the nerve to yank her around like that for years, and Quinn lets herself bend and fold and fall on top of Santana with ease.

A comma only works within dependent factors, bringing together what can't stand alone, but a semicolon joins those that can be held up alone but would rather not be. Santana's hand is sliding softly under her shirt, tracing memorized lines of scar tissue and the recovering strength of a rebuilt spine, and Tina kicks them both with a disgruntled whine; Quinn lets her body slump comfortably to rest on top of Santana's, a heavy heartbeat pulsing underneath the tan skin her cheek presses into, and ponders the merits of the semicolon.


End file.
